


EXO 2.22: You can (not) come back.

by windowright (twoif)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7589158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/windowright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FINALE: We are One. // <a>世界の中心で レッツアイ を叫んだけもの.</a></p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>When the rescue crew forcibly open EXO KAI's core, they find Jongin naked, unconscious, with a faint smile on his face. There's no sign of his plug suit. His hands are caked in blood all the way up to his elbows. They scrub him down, trying to find a wound, but other than a scratch on his forehead—"most likely from hitting the controls by accident," one of the technicians explains—Jongin's body is pristine.</p>
  <p>"So whose blood is that?" Kyungsoo demands as he follows Jongin's gurney to the doors of the ICU.</p>
  <p>Baekhyun, wordlessly, hands him the supercomputer analysis of the bits dug out from under Jongin's fingernails. </p>
  <p>It's <em>Pattern Pearl.</em><br/></p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	1. Episode One: Let Out the Beast

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [August 2013](http://windowright.livejournal.com/7936.html).

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXO KAI goes berserk and destroys a good fourth of Seoul-3 along with the Angel the first time Jongin pilots him. 

"It," Baekhyun corrects, one eyebrow raised. "The first time Jongin pilots _it_."

"You're the one who said it when we were giving Jongin the grand tour," Kyungsoo reminds Baekhyun, blowing on his coffee to cool it. "The EXOs are basically giant humans in armor."

Baekhyun snorts. "It was an over-simplification for Jongin's benefit. I didn't mean to anthropomorphize."

Kyungsoo, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, just shrugs. Behind Baekhyun, the supercomputers S.E.S thrum with schizophrenic activity, running reports on EXO KAI's percent damage, how much it will cost to repair the motors of ten of Seoul-3's retractable buildings, and analysis on the composition of the Angel, which Baekhyun has named 'LEETEUK.' _Isn't this just asking for there to be eleven more of them_? Kyungsoo had asked that morning, when they were picking through the rescued remains, and Baekhyun's snort had been loud enough to hear through the mas of their hazmat suits as he said, _they had thirteen members, actually_. That had been a few hours ago, and the S.E.S. is still torn as to whether the Angel leftovers are safe enough for them to touch with bare hands. BADA says yes, EUGENE no, and SHOO is still contemplating, its blinking signal like a tinny mechanical heartbeat throbbing behind Baekhyun's head. 

"So what's the damage?" Baekhyun asks, interrupting Kyungsoo's train of thought.

"To KAI? We can keep cannibalizing LAY's spare parts, as long as Yixing is still recovering. It's dicey, though. They're not totally compatible models, since they use different core prototypes."

"I wasn't talking about the EXO," Baekhyun says. When Kyungsoo stares back at him, blank, he adds, "I meant, how is Jongin doing?"

"He's fine." Kyungsoo puts up a hand before Baekhyun can interrupt. "Okay, okay, I _think_ he's fine. I haven't spoken to him since he woke up. The medical department said he's physically fine."

"You should talk to him," Baekhyun offers. "Berserking is a traumatic event, especially since he can't remember anything. He needs a _hyung_ 's support."

Kyungsoo bristles, but this is an argument he and Baekhyun already hashed out after Kyungsoo signed himself up to be Jongin's guardian, and if there's one thing Kyungsoo has learned, it's that Baekhyun never changes his mind. "I'm not his _hyung_ ," Kyungsoo answers, rote. "I'm his commanding officer."

"He lives with you," Baekhyun insists, turning back to his laptop as if to dismiss further argument. "You're the one who took him in. You're family now."

"He has family," Kyungsoo reminds Baekhyun, and Baekhyun gives him a look that says more clearly than any words, _don't be stupid_ , and, well, Baekhyun is right, he's usually right, so Kyungsoo takes in a deep breath, pulls his jacket closer around him, and goes back to his apartment to find Jongin.

What he finds instead is a kitchen full of SME agents in black suits, hidden Kevlar, and earpieces. Jongin's phone is on the table, powered off; with its GPS signal that connects straight to the S.E.S. and Baekhyun in the Technical Division, it would be too simple otherwise. "Do you know where he might have gone?" one of the agents asks Kyungsoo, after a brusque salute, and barely manages to suppress his look of surprise when Kyungsoo shakes his head.

"I—" _was only his guardian for convenience's sake_ , is what Kyungsoo is about to say. But he remembers the way Jongin looked when Kyungsoo told him he wouldn't have to live alone, the way he'd hesitated between resistance and relief, the obliging way Jongin let himself be led into a stranger's house and the stranger house of SME. He sees out of the corner of his eye the pile of spare clothes Kyungsoo had procured for Jongin, folded in a clumsy imitation of Kyungsoo's own methods. Jongin had been living with his aging elementary teacher out in Busan before Kyungsoo picked him up and plopped him in the middle of Seoul-3 — into the cockpit of EXO KAI, in the middle, in fact, of an intergalatic fight for the survival of mankind. Loneliness is no one's responsibility, but maybe Kyungsoo had, without even knowing it, bargained for some small part of Jongin's when he brought Jongin into his life.

In his head, Baekhyun's voice is saying, _don't be stupid_. 

So Kyungsoo swallows and says instead, "Let me help with the search."

 

 

 

36 hours later, Jongin comes back to the apartment, unaccompanied. Kyungsoo tries to convince the SME agents guarding the perimeter to stand down and let Jongin off, but they're under Commander Wu's orders, and there are, in fact, procedures for these things. They take Jongin to the solitary confinement cells in HQ, even though Kyungsoo argues long and hard that there's nothing to charge Jongin with. As a paramilitary organization with one foot in the United Nations and the other foot in wherever their funding comes from, SME has a very detailed section in its employment contract providing for exactly how much force can be used in the event of an employee's unscheduled abandonment. But Jongin was never given a contract to sign. Come to think of it, Kyungsoo's not sure any of the EXO pilots have.

It takes three hours before the order letting Kyungsoo see Jongin comes down. He's handed Jongin's personnel sheet, the details all blacked out with a permanent marker and a big red stamp across Jongin's picture that says 'PROBATION.' 

"For what?" Kyungsoo asks, frowning. He flips the page over and, besides the marker bleeding through, there's nothing.

The guard doesn't even look up. "Insubordination and theft of government property."

"What was the government property?"

"His ID card. SME makes them through a ROKA grant," the man deadpans. He's wearing sunglasses, even though they're twenty levels down in the GeoFront, so Kyungsoo can't tell if he's joking, which is probably the point. Before Kyungsoo can think to say anything else, the cell door bangs shut behind him.

 

 

 

The first thing Jongin says when he sees Kyungsoo is a soft, "Oh." It sounds pushed out of him, so quiet Kyungsoo wonders if it's a sound at all, or just a sharp intake.

The next thing he says is, "I thought they'd send my father."

"Commander Wu is a very busy man," Kyungsoo tells him, a little too sharply.

Jongin nods, looking back down at where they have him triple-cuffed. It's more SME procedure, and not an actual assessment of Jongin's flight risk, but Kyungsoo still winces. The cuffs hang off of him, too heavy and big for his thin wrists. If Kyungsoo were the kind of person to think in metaphors—

"I guess I knew he was too busy for me," Jongin continues. "But I thought, if I at least tried to run away—after, you know, I showed I could be a pilot—"

It's Kyungsoo's turn to breathe, "oh," and Jongin falls silent.

Kyungsoo's father died during Second Comeback when Kyungsoo was still a teenager. It had been his idea to bring Kyungsoo along during the activation experiment, and he'd spent the last seconds of his life pushing Kyungsoo out of the explosion radius and out to sea, which is how they found Kyungsoo later, wrapped in his father's jacket, pupils blown wide trying to see through the thick darkness of the escape pod. Kyungsoo's never thought of himself as a person with father issues ( _but daddy complexes aren't the only things that can fuck you up, and trust me,_ Chanyeol once told him, _you're plenty fucked up_ ,but that was back in college and in the middle of an argument which segued into bad, drunk make-up sex, so as psychoanalysis sessions go, not very helpful), but Kyungsoo has also never known much about father-son bonding. To Kyungsoo, Commander Wu's relationship to Jongin as "father" is less than a week old, and hasn't yet eclipsed the way Kyungsoo thought of Jongin before, when he was just a pilot assignation on a computer print-out: impersonal, instrumental, as much a piece of EXO KAI's machinery as an arm or a bolt. It's both easier and harder to see Jongin more completely, as a boy mostly-orphaned at the same age Kyungsoo was. Easier, because Kyungsoo knows what it feels like, to be alone. 

Harder, because he's never figured out what to do to make that feeling go away.

"I'm sure your father didn't come to see you," Kyungsoo says, very slowly, "because he trusts you to do the right thing no matter what."

Jongin's head snaps up. "And piloting the EXO, that's the right thing?" he demands. 

"What do you think?"

"I thought, if I did this for him, he'd at least look at me. And, you know, one day accept me as his son." As if embarrassed by his honesty, Jongin looks back down at his handcuffs. He lifts up his hands, lets them fall back down. The sound is familiar, and Kyungsoo is shocked to realize he knows why: they're made of the same metal as the EXO cages, and he hears the rattling every time they pull open the cages for access.

He takes a cautious step towards Jongin. In the dim light of the cell, it's hard to tell what expression is on Jongin's face. "Are you going to go through life doing everything just to get your father's acceptance?" Kyungsoo asks.

"Why else should I pilot it?"

"The EXO was made for you. You were chosen to pilot it, and when you did, it responded. You defeated an Angel in it, when no one else could, with your own hands. Isn't that enough?"

There's a glint of plastic by Jongin's feet, which turns out to be Jongin's voided ID card, punched through with holes in the shape of diamonds and triangles, making giant X's across the surface. Kyungsoo bends down to pick it up, then places it between Jongin's hands, which are cold and very dry. "We're all counting on you," Kyungsoo says. Jongin fingers tighten suddenly around the voided ID card, and Kyungsoo licks his lips, praying for the right words. "SME, South Korea, even the world. Don't do it for your dad. Do it for yourself, and for the rest of us."

At the time of his death, Kyungsoo's father was a member of the proto-group that would one day become SME. Kyungsoo took a long time after college deciding whether joining SME would be carrying or betraying his legacy. When Kyungsoo interviewed with the Tactical Division, there were no EXOs, only M1 and M2, prototype cores connected to the S.E.S like massive hearts on life support waiting for a transplant. Right before his interview, the technician on duty gave Kyungsoo a tour and he'd — Minseok, Kyungsoo remembers, that was his name — even let Kyungsoo touch M1. Unexpectedly, it had flared up under his hand, jolting SHOO, who sent out a query to the other two asking if this was the right pilot. _It likes you,_ Minseok had said wryly. _Who knows, we might have to use you as a pilot._ To Kyungsoo, that had felt like a sign, one that he couldn't explain, and one that was wholly unconnected to the memory of his father silhouetted against the Second Comeback.

So when SME sent him a job offer, Kyungsoo had taken it. A year later, they put M1 into EXO KAI.

( _You're so simple to win over,_ Chanyeol had said, once upon a time. _All it takes is a fucking pat on your head and you're gone_.)

"You did well, Jongin," Kyungsoo whispers, putting his hand over the ID and covering Jongin's fingers. "For defeating the Angel, thank you. And good job."

Finally, Jongin looks up and, with a shaky smile, nods. 

 

 

 

"But why didn't you say, 'do it for me?'" Baekhyun asks cheekily when, afterwards, they are reviewing the transcript from the covert recordings.

"I couldn't ask something like that from him," Kyungsoo scoffs. "I barely even know him." He plays idly with the twin porcelain cat figurines, one black and one white, on Baekhyun's table, as Baekhyun guides the supercomputers through another stage of analysis. The model of the Angel Baekhyun is constructing looks oddly humanoid, especially side-by-side with the outline of EXO KAI on the other screen. It reminds Kyungsoo that when he first joined SME, Commander Wu had told him the EXOs were made in the shape of Adam. _The one in the Bible_? Kyungsoo had asked, confused, but no, _Adam, the first Angel_ , Commander Wu corrected with a characteristic tight smile, _because only monsters are capable of fighting monsters_ , and Kyungsoo didn't think to ask then, _what does that make us?_

Maybe monsters, he thinks now, always end up making things in the shape of themselves.

"Well," Baekhyun says, shaking his head and throwing his copy of the transcript down on the table, "now that you're stuck with him, you might as well get to know him better." 

After a bit Baekhyun frowns. Through the window, they can see EXO KAI's face as it sits in its hanger. Even on standby, the eyes are lit up, as if it's looking in on the both of them, measuring them, and not liking what it sees. Somewhere, Jongin, too, is on standby: trying on a plugsuit, getting a new ID card made, turning on the SME phone issued to him and finding Kyungsoo's number, the only contact in his address book. Kyungsoo wonders if Jongin is also measuring them up. He wonders whether Jongin, calm and safe now that he's no longer in an isolation cell surrounded by armed guards, regrets what he sees.

"I guess we're all stuck with him," Baekhyun finishes. He presses a key on his laptop to turn EXO KAI completely off.


	2. Episode Two: Both of You, Dance Like You Have No Regrets Dying on Stage!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zitao arrives in Seoul-3 just as the next Angel attacks a fleet of naval ships near Pohang. EXO KAI is fast, but not water-ready; EXO TAO, on the other hand, is equipped with the new Chinese Type M levitation armor for the feet. It streaks like a giant black and crimson bird across the water and ends with a perfect kick to the Angel's core. This time, the Angel explodes, coating everything in its vicinity with a bright red liquid that Baekhyun later pronounces to be a near cousin of LCL and the S.E.S. pronounces to be more than 79% identical to blood. The Technical Division dubs the hemoglobin structure _Pattern Pearl,_ and Baekhyun jokingly programs the S.E.S. to play the riff of "Sorry, Sorry" whenever an Angel is detected.

Kyungsoo would be happy about the addition of another pilot, if the ship carrying Zitao and EXO TAO didn't also carry Park Chanyeol, now a special inspector for SME and Zitao's guardian. Kyungsoo hasn't seen Chanyeol since they broke up a year after they graduated college, but that doesn't stop Chanyeol from waving wildly at Kyungsoo from the deck of the ship and calling out, "Honey, I'm home!" in English when he descends.

"You're lucky Commander Wu gave me specific orders not to punch you in the face," Kyungsoo hisses through Chanyeol's headlock. 

"Is that actually true?" Chanyeol asks, curiously peering down on Kyungsoo.

"No," Kyungsoo admits. That, too, is half a lie, since the addendum was Vice Commander Kim's, but part of growing up and no longer cohabitating-slash-fucking people who had nothing in common with you except music taste was learning that two half-lies make up something approximating a whole truth. He twists one more time against Chanyeol's arm, to get comfortable. Chanyeol smiles, all teeth, and presses his lips against Kyungsoo's cheek.

 

 

 

Zitao is Jongin's age, much taller, all sinew and jawline, and speaks a curiously accented Korean with rolling r's. He spends most of the introductory tour snuggling into Chanyeol's back, ignoring everyone, until Jongin hesitantly points at Zitao's ear. "The piercings," Jongin asks, "does your EXO pick up on them when syncing?" and Zitao gives him a look that can only be kindly described as withering.

"Give you a face full of piercings and you still can't beat my sync ratio," Zitao pronounces, before disappearing into a well-worn grey hoodie and earbuds. Behind Zitao, Chanyeol meets Kyungsoo's slightly shocked gaze, and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, _don't look at me_. Kyungsoo just glares. 

"He did ask if we could mirror his piercings on EXO TAO," Chanyeol says. Zitao, scowling, tries to kick at Chanyeol's legs, but Chanyeol sidesteps it without even needing to look. "I told him TAO didn't have ears."

"Custom paint job, though," Baekhyun notes as he gives EXO TAO in its hangar an appreciative one-over. "And is that a Taurus sign painted on TAO's chest?"

Chanyeol grins. "Taozi's idea," he says. He tries to pinch Zitao's cheek, and Zitao kicks him again, this time only playfully. "A real brat. We spoil him silly," Chanyeol continues, slouching against Zitao. 

Chanyeol has gotten older, with the beginning of wrinkles forming between his eyebrows, lines that Kyungsoo probably already has threefold. But still the same ears, too big for his face and made worse by his slicked-back hairstyle and neat suit, one shirt-tail untucked. Pressed against Zitao, Chanyeol looks almost manageable, but Kyungsoo knows that if he were to stand next to Chanyeol, pull him up so they were toe to toe, Chanyeol would still tower over him, unrepentant.

"I can't believe they let you take on a pilot," Kyungsoo tells him. "Zitao's probably already more mature than you'll ever be."

"Hey!" Chanyeol scowls. "I'm a great _hyung_ to Zitao. You on the other hand," he says as he reaches a hand out to tousle Jongin's hair. His eyes are still trained on Kyungsoo, though, and he misses the way Jongin flinches at his touch. "You're probably cold as ice to Jongin," Chanyeol continues. "Isn't he, Jonginnie? You can be honest."

For a minute Kyungsoo considers snatching Jongin away from Chanyeol, shielding him the way Zitao makes Chanyeol shield him from the outside world, but that would be childish, and anyway, he's never made it a habit to grab at things that weren't his. "Don't you have work to do?" he snaps instead. "Surely they didn't bring you here just to criticize my interpersonal skills."

Chanyeol's hand stills on Jongin's head, slides down to his arm and rests there, above Jongin's elbow. "Chasing me out already?" he asks.

" _I_ have work to do." When Chanyeol turns to Jongin, Kyungsoo adds, "Everyone here does."

There's an awkward half-beat, where Jongin's eyes dart between Chanyeol's hand and Kyungsoo, and Baekhyun pretends to ignore all of them, picking away at the keyboard. Finally, Zitao pops his chewing gum and takes out an earbud. "You're the bully," he tells Chanyeol, eyes half-lidded and mouth pulled back into a thin grin. " _Oppa, hajima,_ " he drawls, and dismissively turns back to his music player.

Chanyeol's laughter is surprised and, oddly, a little insincere. He stands up and straightens his tie, releasing Jongin's arm. Jongin, relieved, slinks away to perch over Baekhyun's shoulder, pretending to be absorbed in the lines of coding flashing by on Baekhyun's console. "As a matter of fact," Chanyeol says, "I actually do need to see Commander Wu about a thing. Do you know where he is?"

"Where he always is," Baekhyun snickers. "In his office with the vice commander, playing _janggi_ while pretending to be busy."

"Take me there?" Chanyeol turns to Kyungsoo, his voice sliding into a whine.

"Get Baekhyun to print out a map," Kyungsoo retorts. 

Baekhyun does, complete with bright red "You Are Here / Now Go Here" asterisks. Chanyeol leaves with surprising briskness and Zitao, unbidden, flits after him like a dark shadow. "I don't think Zitao should—" Kyungsoo begins, but Zitao has his earbuds in and doesn't hear him. By the time Kyungsoo realizes Zitao can't hear him, they're both already gone. Baekhyun's office, crowded with print-outs and model EXO parts, feels twice its size without them. Kyungsoo thinks of how long Zitao's legs are, finely jointed, just like his EXO. 

"It's weird they wanted Chanyeol," Baekhyun mutters around the cap of a pen. He's doodling copies of EXO TAO's Taurus sign on an empty notepad while he waits for the specs on EXO TAO to load.

Kyungsoo collapses into a chair next to him, weirdly exhausted. "I'm sure it's good for Zitao to have something familiar," he muses. He's disciplined enough that he doesn't glance at Jongin when he says it.

"No, I meant, Commander Wu and Vice Commander Kim. He made it sound like they had an appointment, and they never see personnel unless they have to." 

"Who knows," Kyungsoo says, shrugging. He reaches over for Baekhyun's pen and draws a fair copy of the logo next to Baekhyun's, then adds a little smirking face in the circle. It looks like a head with devil horns. Baekhyun grins, scribbling _Yeollie_ with a little arrow next to it.

Since Chanyeol and Zitao left, Jongin has been pressing his face against the glass windows of Baekhyun's office, as if that would bring him closer to the two EXOs that he can see through it. "Why doesn't Zitao's unit have a special name?" he asks. "Besides Zitao's own, I mean."

Kyungsoo, taken aback, goes to stand next to Jongin. EXO TAO's name, like all the other EXOs, is emblazoned on its shoulder, like a lit-up tattoo. "It might be to differentiate models. EXO KAI is special, you know," Kyungsoo tells Jongin. "You're piloting one of the only EXOs made with a core instead of a cockpit. The other models probably all have shortened names of their pilots." Jongin nods, satisfied.

There's only one other unit like EXO KAI: EXO LAY, the M2 to KAI's M1 core, still sleeping in a hardened ocean of Bakelite down in a testing room. EXO LAY had also gone berserk after Yixing climbed into its core, just weeks before Jongin arrived. It had been why Jongin was needed, as a backup pilot and a fail-safe since Yixing had been so badly injured during the activation. So many coincidences, Kyungsoo thinks, as he tallies them up with a frown. It was good luck that Jongin just happened to arrive so soon before LEETEUK attacked, and good luck that Zitao arrived just as HEECHUL was making laser cut-outs of three _Sejong the Great_ class destroyers. Good luck that Jongin hated his father, and good luck that Kyungsoo could empathize with that hate enough to talk Jongin back down. Good luck that Kyungsoo's father died for his work, and good luck that Kyungsoo, now, had only his work in his life and thus, in a way, only Jongin.

Good luck that he and Chanyeol had never been compatible, and good luck that Chanyeol was still such an asshole that Kyungsoo wouldn't forget. 

"You and Chanyeol are old friends?" Jongin asks, suddenly and very innocently. 

Behind them, Baekhyun cackles. "Shut up," Kyungsoo hisses at him, and then, quickly, to Jongin, "not you."

" _Oppa, hajima_ ," Baekhyun croons. "You never said anything like that when you were with Chanyeol, and you were actually dating him." 

"You were dating?" Jongin croaks, shocked, and Kyungsoo resignedly presses his forehead against the window. As good luck went, his was probably shitty luck after all.

 

 

 

They barely beat HANKYUNG. As soon as it steps into radius EXO TAO rushes ahead without consulting anyone on the attack, and Jongin tries to follow, only to disconnect from the power cord that keeps KAI plugged into Seoul-3's grid. When Jongin makes a grab for it, the Angel notices, and the next five minutes are spent with KAI lassoed to the Angel with the cord. The Angel by itself doesn't have much offensive power, but with EXO KAI in hand, it's easy to bludgeon EXO TAO into oblivion, and Zitao spends most of the time frantically clawing at the air, always missing the umbilical cord by a hair. 

Long-range combat, though, has never been Zitao's strong point. Instead he waits for the momentum of one of the Angel's swings, lets it catch him by the knees and fling him up towards the Angel. The combined force of gravity and EXO TAO's progressive knife breaks through the core. EXO KAI goes crashing to the ground a few meters away, binding EXO TAO and the Angel closer together, like the ball at the end of a chain. Zitao finishes it with his hands, wedging TAO's fingers into the crack of the Angel's core and ripping it apart. The erupting stream of Pattern Pearl blood paints EXO TAO's whole head red, almost blending in with the rest of its color scheme.

The Angel had ripped EXO KAI's power cord from its socket during the fight; so, afterwards, with no power source and a run-down battery, EXO KAI has no way of crawling out of the crater its body made on impact. "You fight your EXO. Not fighting with it," Zitao says disdainfully as EXO TAO tries to drag EXO KAI out of the crater by its arm. "It's amateur."

"If I'm such an amateur, then you can fight it yourself next time, you don't need me," Jongin shoots back, bristling, and Zitao hisses, "Maybe I will," and Kyungsoo has to remind them both that their units are still connected to the SME-wide intercom system and, especially, to Chanyeol, who is laughing so hard he's in danger of asphyxiating. 

"It's my fault," Kyungsoo tells Jongin afterwards, trying not to laugh at Jongin's stormy face as he towels off after his shower. "I should have thought about a better training regimen. Let's work harder together, okay?"

"I know I can do it," Jongin says stubbornly. "I know it. EXO KAI was built for me."

 _Your father died for you,_ Commander Wu had said at the end of Kyungsoo's interview — but no, Kyungsoo shakes his head, a slight shiver running down his spine, Jongin was quoting Kyungsoo's own words back at him, and projection is a sign of a weak and selfish psyche. 

"We'll make good on the promise, together," Kyungsoo says. After a great deal of thought, he very carefully cups his hand on the back of Jongin's head. Kyungsoo's hand is smaller than Chanyeol's, and in less than a year, Kyungsoo predicts that he and Jongin will be the same height. He'll never tower over Jongin like Chanyeol does. He'll never tower over anyone that way. But this time Jongin closes his eyes and leans into the pressure, like a cat accepting attention and, pleased, Kyungsoo keeps his hand there for a second longer than he had planned, fingers just barely tangling in Jongin's damp hair.

 

 

 

Kyungsoo's life is full of accidents, coincidences, convergences, all spiraling down into the eye of the storm that is SME. Jongin, untrained and untested, was a replacement for Yixing, and Zitao was brought in as his backup. It'd only be his luck, then, that just as Kyungsoo plans to train Jongin properly, Yixing is pronounced to be fit, once again, for combat.

"But the Cassiopeia Treaty says we're not allowed to have more than two active pilots in the field," Kyungsoo frets as he flips through Yixing's medical summary. "And we can't exactly send Zitao back."

"Just use the exception," Baekhyun says, shrugging. "Tell NATO that Yixing's just a trainer. It's not like we can get EXO LAY up and running anytime soon anyway, since all the spare parts are on KAI."

"A trainer? Yixing?" Kyungsoo leans back, dubious. "I'm not sure if that's the best for Jongin. Yixing's not exactly—" He gestures in the general direction of his head. When Baekhyun continues to stare at him, Kyungsoo adds, helplessly, "He's not all here, you know?"

"What, _sane_?"

"No, no," Kyungsoo says, embarrassed. "Just that he's not actually always paying attention."

Yixing is the oldest of the EXO pilots and, with no parents and no paper trail, the most mysterious. As far as Kyungsoo knows, Yixing has never left the country, even though he speaks Korean with the uncertainty of a taciturn foreigner. Officially, he's Commander Wu's adopted son, a fact that Kyungsoo had already found strange before Jongin's arrival. Now he founds it downright baffling. Baekhyun used to joke that Yixing was a robot, but that was before the activation of EXO LAY went south and Yixing had to trigger the emergency ejection, sending the core hurtling headlong towards the 12-layer-thick test room walls at a force equivalent to nearly 250g. The Bakelite used to freeze EXO LAY and keep it from destroying the test room had seeped, accidentally, into the M2 core, and Yixing had crashed into the quickly hardening leakage upon impact. Blunt trauma to the head, multiple broken ribs, abrasions along the neck and face, and Bakelite hardening in some of the cuts, fibers of it binding, as it was synthesized to do, with muscle, forcing the wounds to stay open. Kyungsoo remembers the blood, and the quantity, and it had seemed plenty realistic.

To Kyungsoo, Jongin is still a mystery, but only so much as any other stranger. Yixing, Kyungsoo doesn't think he can ever understand. He'd visited Yixing after his condition was stabilized and they'd chemically extracted the Bakelite pieces. "Don't worry," Kyungsoo had said, "they tell me you'll be ready to get back into the EXO in a few weeks," and Yixing had looked up at him uncomprehendingly and asked, "Why not now?"

"So I was wrong," Baekhyun had huffed afterwards, throwing up his hands. "Cyborg, not robot."

Zitao is the most accurate pilot, with a hit-to-kill ratio of almost 1:1, and Jongin the fastest adapter, the only pilot to activate and fight in an EXO on his first try, but Yixing is, in the end, the one that's spent the longest in the SME program. He molds in with EXO KAI like it, too, was built for him. It's not surprising, then, that Jongin takes to Yixing with surprising intensity. Since Jongin is a kinetic learner, Baekhyun figures out a way to program EXO KAI's core to function with both Yixing and Jongin in the cockpit. Their brainwaves cross over, overlap, with very little friction, as KAI raises both arms, flexes, fits fist in palm in one smooth motion. "If I were an online dating site," Baekhyun begins, but shakes his head. Kyungsoo, too, is at a loss for words. They watch the multi-colored sine curves twist and realign in silence until Zitao in EXO TAO mutters something in Chinese. No one understands him, but Yixing laughs on a two second delay, surprising all of them and causing the display of Jongin's wave to finally spike, dissonant, against Yixing's. 

They arrange a practice fight in the afternoon, Yixing and Jongin versus Zitao in Genie simulations of their EXOs. Zitao wins with ease and, at the end, haughtily rips off his simulcast visor without waiting to be disconnected, and Baekhyun has to coax him back, saying, _best two out of three, okay?_ But win or not, Kyungsoo can spot the immediate change in Jongin's movements. Yixing's clarity overlaid on Jongin's energy, the disciplined arc of EXO KAI's newly learned kicks, as if it were mirroring the still-silent EXO LAY. Kyungsoo blinks, and for a second he sees EXO LAY wearing EXO KAI's head. Blinks again, rapidly, to return to the present: three teenage boys lying prone, fingers twitching as they move imagined controls, the wires of the VR system extending from their bodies to the ceiling, like a cocoon.


	3. Episode Three: Heart Attack

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I had a dream," Jongin says a week later, as they're waiting to start a sync test, "about my mom."

"Oh lord," Baekhyun mutters under his breath.

Kyungsoo swings around in his chair to swat at him with a rolled-up manual, which Baekhyun dodges. But Baekhyun's not hooked up to any of the mics feeding into the EXO intercom, so Jongin continues, oblivious, "Or, I don't know, it might have been Yixing- _hyung_."

"Yixing looks nothing like your mother," Kyungsoo says, and bites down on his lip, because, actually, Yixing _did_ look a little like the one picture of Commander Wu's wife Kyungsoo's seen. Over his shoulder, Baekhyun raises an eyebrow that asks, _want me to pull up a profile?_ , but Kyungsoo shakes his head. What would be the point?

"I guess you might consider Yixing a mother figure for Jongin," Baekhyun muses.

 _if you wanted to raise a nintendog,_ Kyungsoo types into Baekhyun's command line, so the mics won't pick it up, and Baekhyun laughs.

"In my dream," Jongin says, "my mother points at a tree on top of a hill in the distance and tells me to go to it. So I get up and start walking, but my body becomes really heavy, and I look down, and I'm covered in pieces of armor."

"What have I told you about reading fantasy webtoons before going to bed?" Kyungsoo asks idly, examining the biometric stats the S.E.S are spitting out for Jongin and Zitao. 

"No, not metal armor, more like—" On the screen monitoring EXO KAI's cockpit, they can see Jongin pause and furrow his eyebrows, his eyes still closed as EXO KAI's internal sensors scan his body. In the split screen, they can also see Zitao stoically pretend to ignore the conversation, though he gives himself away by frowning the way he does only when he's trying to understand Korean. "A mini EXO KAI, small enough to fit on me," Jongin says finally. "But it was growing out of me, you know, coming out of my skin. And every piece I grew, I got heavier, and heavier, until I couldn't walk anymore and started sinking into the ground. It was like I was being buried alive."

Kyungsoo frowns, turning his full attention to Jongin's face on the screen, but Baekhyun pats his hand soothingly, rolling his eyes as he mouths, _so Freudian_. "Don't worry," Baekhyun chirps into the mic, "that's just stress. Everyone gets that sometimes."

"You're still adjusting to being a pilot, Jongin," Kyungoo adds. "That's all."

Jongin nods. After a while, though, he wrinkles his forehead again. "Kyungsoo- _hyung,_ have you ever been in an EXO?"

"Once," Kyungsoo admits. Only once, on an evening when Baekhyun had needed to run neuro-language feed calibration, and no one was working overtime except for Kyungsoo. Baekhyun had let him get into a test EXO cockpit, KAI's, in fact. It was early on, before Kyungsoo knew you had to breathe in the LCL for oxygen. Instead he'd held his breath the whole time the LCL flooded in. He still remembers the way it felt, pressing in all around him, the hard pressure like being squeezed, in or out, Kyungsoo hadn't been able to tell, at least not before he passed out from air hunger and Baekhyun, shamefacedly, had to call a medical team to make sure he hadn't accidentally killed Kyungsoo.

"Then you know the way LCL smells," Jongin insists. "That's what it smelled like, when I woke up. Like..."

"Hmm?"

Jongin sighs. On the screen, there is a little stream of bubbles that escapes from his mouth, which Kyungsoo can tell disturbs Baekhyun, because that's not how air in the EXO core should work. The bubbles disappear, popping, in a loose halo around Jongin's forehead. "Familiar," Jongin exhales. "Like someone I used to know, or someone wearing my clothes. My own smell."

"Weirdo," Zitao snickers.

"You're one to talk, pinhead," Jongin shoots back, hurt. 

"All right, quiet down, you two," Kyungsoo says, clapping to get their attention, "the test is about to start."

For the first time since Zitao's arrival, Jongin beats him in a sync test. Zitao, raised by Chanyeol and with Chanyeol's sense of competition, spends the afternoon sulking, and Chanyeol has to coax him out of the locker room with the promise of a barbecue dinner, much to Kyungsoo's amusement. But the next time Kyungsoo sees the pilots together, they're sharing earbuds in the SME cafeteria, Zitao occasionally prodding Jongin to translate the text of the music magazine they're poring over. 

"Don't they remind you of someone?" Chanyeol says, creeping up from behind Kyungsoo, and Kyungsoo grunts, knocking Chanyeol's shoulder a little too hard as he turns to go.

When the fourth Angel attacks, they are ready. Jongin and Zitao are flawless on the offensive, as if the physicality of the fight breaks down all language barriers. The Angel tears off the plating of EXO KAI's back, but KAI shakes it off, its waist more flexible and soft without the armor, and Jongin throws out one of Yixing's pirouetting kicks, sending the Angel straight into Zitao's progressive knife. Afterwards, Baekhyun proudly reports Jongin's sync rate: _98%._ "It's like he's really become his EXO," he muses and Kyungsoo pauses, but only for a minute.

 

 

 

Because it's been over a month since Chanyeol arrived and he's only made an inappropriate move on Kyungsoo twice (compared to the five times on Baekhyun — four times as a joke and once, Kyungsoo suspects, actually seriously), Kyungsoo feels safe saying yes to dinner after work, which doesn't stop Baekhyun from putting a condom in Kyungsoo's wallet. It dutifully embarrasses Kyungsoo by falling out when he goes to pay for his half of the bill. "Baekhyun's idea of a joke," Kyungsoo explains, red-faced as he throws the condom away. 

"Has to be for your other boyfriend on the side," Chanyeol says with a wide grin. "That one was an extra small."

In college Kyungsoo and Chanyeol were horrible at dating and especially at dating each other, but they were, in the end, friends first. With years separating past sex and their current companionship, Kyungsoo can almost look at Chanyeol from a distance and see him objectively: the mellowed pitch of his laugh, the extra wrinkles on his face, the unchanged volume of his voice, which he used both indiscriminately and with surprising deftness, how he would unfurl his body quickly whenever he sprang into action. And, mostly, Kyungsoo can see what drew them together in the first place — the way they moved with and against each other without speaking, instinctively understanding even the most casual of subterfuges. So when Chanyeol only drinks one beer at the restaurant and asks Kyungsoo if he will walk him home, Kyungsoo falls in with the pace, abstains from alcohol, and casually suggests they stop in for _odeng_ at a _pojangmacha_ a few miles outside the radius of the GeoFront, where they're unlikely to encounter any other SME employees.

An hour later, Chanyeol mumbles around a mouthful of mustard and fishcake, "You have questions, but I'm not going to be able to answer any of them."

"So why are we here?" Kyungsoo grumps, pouring them both more soju.

Chanyeol grunts, then squints into his plate of _odeng_ , as if looking for answers. When none swim up from the broth, he swallows thickly and offers Kyungsoo a skewered turnip, eats it slowly when Kyungsoo refuses. "You've been to Terminal Wolf, haven't you?" he says afterwards, with an absent wave of the skewer in the general direction of the GeoFront.

"I'm not authorized," Kyungsoo says. It's an autopilot answer, though, and when he actually processes Chanyeol's tone, Kyungsoo grabs the skewer out of Chanyeol's hand and stabs Chanyeol in the arm, urgent. "Wait, you mean you _have_? What's down there?"

The din rising up from the rest of the _pojangmacha_ customers, a reassuring cover of laughter and chatter, has gotten steadily louder through their stay. Worried he's missed Chanyeol's answer, Kyungsoo leans in closer, skimming his shoulder against Chanyeol's. But when he does speaks, Chanyeol makes himself impossible to miss. He presses his mouth against Kyungsoo's ear, blocking out everything else. "The secret to the EXO Units," he murmurs. "The Tree of Life."

For just a second, as he filters Chanyeol's words from Chanyeol's breath, boozy and warm against his skin, Kyungsoo is thrown back to a moment long ago, when he and Chanyeol and Baekhyun were in college drinking Friday nights after class, Chanyeol's heavy weight bearing down on both sides of memory. The years are ships scraping against each other, grinding Kyungsoo to a halt. "I don't—" Kyungsoo begins, but before he can finish, Chanyeol leans back. The air between them clears, bringing back the sound of the other customers, the _odeng tang_ bubbling next to them, Chanyeol's older face and insincere grin. 

"Or that's what Kr—Commander Wu says," Chanyeol cuts in. "I've never been."

"The Tree of Life?" Kyungsoo pours more soju, forgetting that his cup is still full. While he grabs at some napkins to sop up the mess, he tries to refocus his thoughts and ignore Chanyeol who, despite his feigned drunkenness, is watching him carefully, evaluating. "Is that code for something?"

Chanyeol shrugs. "Search me."

"Does this have something to do with the cores? Or the pilots?"

"Don't you ever wonder about why only two of the EXOs have cores?" Chanyeol pushes Kyungsoo's nearly overflowing cup at him and waits until Kyungsoo has drunk the full shot before continuing. "And how the EXOs choose their pilots?"

"Sure, but that's for—" It's Kyungsoo's turn to gesture towards the GeoFront. "Baekhyun and the Technical Division."

"Just more secrets and bullshit," Chanyeol insists. His face twists, the first truly sincere expression Kyungoo has seen on his face since his arrival in Seoul-3. 

Disturbed, Kyungsoo puts a skewer of fishcakes on each of their plates, to distract himself before he says something too searching. "Maybe," he says. "But if it helps us beat the Angels—I mean, does it matter how much I really understand about the EXOs?"

"Or the Angels."

"As long as we're still alive at the end of the day."

"Kyungsoo's in charge, all's right with the world," Chanyeol mocks.

"This isn't a video game, Park Chanyeol," Kyungsoo hisses. He slams his soju cup against the table for emphasis. It's empty, so the only thing that spills over is Kyungsoo's fishcake skewer, which tumbles off his plate onto the floor. "We don't all get grand backstories, we don't have to unlock anything, this is _reality_."

Kyungsoo has never been a good with alcohol and, on a half-empty stomach and down most of a bottle of soju, intoxication hits him in a sluggish, unrepentant way, like liquid exhaustion making a mold out of his stomach. Chanyeol ebbs away, but their surroundings come into crystal clear focus, made sharper by Kyungsoo's self-conscious hope he isn't coming off as a drunkard. His forehead is too hot, which seems to add five pounds to his entire head. He sinks into his own shoulder only to realize it's actually Chanyeol's. 

"Give me some credit," Chanyeol's voice rumbles under him. "I know it's not a videogame, not if we're using children as pieces on the board."

Kyungsoo laughs. "You're mixing your metaphors."

" _You're_ drunk." Chanyeol puts his hand on Kyungsoo's face, like a shield. He might be trying to pet Kyungsoo's head, only the angle or his aim is off. Kyungsoo isn't sure, just settles into the semi-darkness and the salt smell of Chanyeol's fingers. "You know how we call them Comebacks?" Chanyeol muses. "After the First Impact, I mean. I wonder if it's not just an easy shorthand. Like, maybe, they're something out there trying to reach us, and they're going to keep coming back until we listen to them."

"To fight monsters, we make monsters in the shape of ourselves." That's not what Commander Wu had said, but Kyungsoo can't remember the exact wording. His own paraphrase feels true, in his drunken state. 

Chanyeol nods, jostling Kyungsoo's head. "Sometimes I look at the EXO units, and it feels like I know them."

"Because you know the pilots."

"That must be it," Chanyeol says, unconvinced. Then, as if he is putting Kyungsoo to sleep, he sweeps his palm over Kyungsoo's eyes, drawing them shut. The _pojangmacha_ lights are orange and neon green behind his eyelids. A leaden emptiness invades him, old and full of the years that connect this moment to him, to Chanyeol, to another night when Chanyeol tucked him into bed. He floats, seasick and calm, in between. Chanyeol's words thread through, saying, "but if we could somehow peel back the _layers_ —" 

Layers of flesh and armor, like secrets and bullshit, Kyungsoo muses. He falls into a black, sticky sleep.

 

 

 

The next day, KANGIN appears in the sky over Seoul-3. Zitao attacks the core, textbook with a progressive knife and a lithe spin kick, but it turns out that the actual body is in the shadow, and it swallows up Jongin in EXO KAI. Kyungsoo orders all the remaining N2 mines dropped on the shadow, but the shadow eats them up, until the unexploded metal bodies of the mines are like jagged teeth sticking up from the mouth of the street, a hideous smile mocking Kyungsoo and the rest of SME. From the GeoFront, Kyungsoo watches EXO KAI's remaining battery go from minutes, to seconds, to the negatives; then, the life support system slowly go from active, to hibernation, to dead. Zitao refuses to come out of his EXO, and pounds on the pavement surrounding the shadow body until his own battery runs out. Kyungsoo has to forcibly eject him from the cockpit, and the collection crew brings him back to Headquarters in triple cuffs. 

While they wait on the bridge for a miracle, Zitao falls asleep, still in his plug suit. This isn't the first time Kyungsoo has waited for Jongin to return. The last time, he'd stayed awake the whole night, and, as if doing penance for an unknown sin, he tries to stay awake now. But eventually he, too, falls asleep. His dreams are hazy, hungover, tumultuous. In the distance, Jongin advances, pieces of KAI growing out of him like cancerous limbs: a crooked foot from one hip, a metal hand reaching out from his shoulder blades, casting a wing-like silhouette. He comes close to Kyungsoo, presses both palms to Kyungsoo's temples. Kyungsoo is lucid in his dream, but his body is mired waist-down in orange mud, and when he reaches out for Jongin, it rises to meet him, and suffocates him.

He wakes up to flesh ripping, wet and methodical, a rumbling in his ears that's a distant cousin to sound. Blinking, he watches on the monitor as a bloody figure squeezes out from the spherical body floating above the ground. The surface of the fake Angel twists, shreds like skin under large mechanical teeth. Blunt, well-articulated fingers tear at the sides. Kyungsoo is about to sound the alarms when he notices the glistening, red bundles that ooze out alongside EXO KAI's torso as it makes its way out of the Angel. "Organs?" Chanyeol whispers next to Kyungsoo, horrified. Kyungsoo shakes his head at first, but then EXO KAI growls, shaking its large head like a wild dog, and spits out towards the camera what is unquestionably an Angel core in the shape of a human heart. With one great leap, EXO KAI springs out of the eviscerated sphere of the Angel, making a beeline for the camera. At the last minute, it turns its head away and down. When it looks back at the camera, it has the Angel's heart in its jaws. 

Within seconds, the heart is gone. The armor around EXO KAI's throat bulges. KAI lets out a roar, displaying a scrap of red tissue on one large mechanical incisor. Its teeth are faintly pink. Kyungsoo's heart seems to surge ahead without him. The screen swims out of his focus, and his fuzzy vision makes the patches of drying Angel blood on KAI's face look like a creeping rust. 

"Did KAI..." Chanyeol asks, and then stops, twisting his mouth up in disgust and disbelief.

"Yeah," Kyungsoo whispers, mouth dry. "It just ate the Angel's heart." 

Which is when Zitao lunges away from the railing of the bridge and begins to vomit. The retching almost drowns out the sound of EXO KAI's screams, but not before Kyungsoo notices that it — _he_ — sounds just like Jongin the seconds before he was swallowed into the Angel. Magnified, distorted by the vocal cords of machinery, and so savage it could never belong to the boy who would wait for Kyungsoo to come home to play video games with him before going to sleep, but all the same, unquestionably Jongin.

 

 

 

When the rescue crew forcibly open EXO KAI's core, they find Jongin naked, unconscious, with a faint smile on his face. There's no sign of his plug suit. His hands are caked in blood all the way up to his elbows. They scrub him down, trying to find a wound, but other than a scratch on his forehead — "most likely from hitting the controls by accident," one of the technicians explains — Jongin's body is pristine.

"So whose blood is that?" Kyungsoo demands as he follows Jongin's gurney to the doors of the ICU.

Baekhyun, wordlessly, hands him the supercomputer analysis of the bits dug out from under Jongin's fingernails. 

It's _Pattern Pearl._


	4. Episode Four: Don't Go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terminal Wolf is the lowest level of the GeoFront. Kyungsoo doesn't have the authorization to come down this far, but Chanyeol's ID card does. Kyungsoo had stolen it on a whim, hoping to leave behind a false record of entrance. In the end, he'd swiped his own card anyway, just to double check, and the bright red "UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY" that flashed back was like the scolding he should have given himself for trusting Chanyeol's performance that night at the _pojangmacha_. God's in his heaven, and all's bad luck in Kyungsoo's life.

What awaits him behind reinforced triple doors is a network of deep trenches, dotted with mechanical spines fifty meters tall, like titanic tombstones. Triple-exposed in Kyungsoo's mind, they're the EXO specs laid out on Baekhyun's computer screen, the remains of RYEOWOOK that they manage to recover after they'd laid Jongin away in the hospital bay, the path of a drop of sweat as it traces its way now down Kyungsoo's nape. _It took God seven days to make the world_ , Commander Wu had said, when they'd first put Yixing into LAY. It'd taken SME more than seven years to turn models into cores, then cores into EXOs, but Kyungsoo had always assumed the failures were destroyed. Instead, hundreds of malformed skulls and spines stretch out in front of him, painted LCL orange like EXO LAY, the word "REJECT" printed in the iconic script of the SME logo across where the forehead would be. Their limbs have been detached and haphazardly slotted between spinal cords, sometimes piled on the remains of older, rotting models. A few meters away, one of the failed prototype arms is poking out, as if whoever had thrown it away forgot to properly stuff it down the trench. The rusting hand rests against the edge, fingers still curled, as if scrabbling for purchase.

 _The Tree of Life_ , Chanyeol had said that night as they leaned into each other, and Kyungsoo had asked him if it was some sort of code. No, he realizes now, not code, but just a bad joke. The trenches fan out in front of him like the tributaries of a river — or, perhaps, the branches of a tree hollowed out. 

When Kyungsoo gets to the end of the graveyard, the wall opens automatically, revealing an atrium with only a central walkway lit up. The path leads to a pillar, but the meager lights are barely enough to trace the circumference, and Kyungsoo can't tell how tall the pillar is, or what the atrium walls are made of. Glass, Kyungsoo thinks, filled with something liquid that bubbles through a filtration system. He smells metal, refrigeration, LCL; nothing human. Still, he reaches for his gun, takes it off safety, just in case. But when he whips around to look for a light switch, he ends up pointing the gun straight at Jongin's face. 

" _Hyung_ ," Jongin whispers. 

Kyungsoo almost pulls the trigger out of shock. At the last minute, his finger slips, and he lowers his arm. "What the hell are you doing here?" 

"I followed you," Jongin says. "You passed by my hospital room door on the way down and I-I thought—"

He is wearing a hospital robe, ice blue in the faint light, which makes him appear skinnier, almost ghost-like. When he takes a few steps forward, Kyungsoo realizes that he's shuffling. The plastic and paper slippers issued to him are too big for his feet. "Jongin, you should go back," Kyungsoo hisses, but, as if mocking him, the door to the EXO graveyard slides noiselessly shut. Kyungsoo curses. Like a frightened animal, Jongin rushes towards him, away from the exit.

"Where are we?" he says, pressing himself into Kyungsoo's shoulder.

Kyungsoo opens his mouth to say, _I don't know_ , but a voice behind them, immense with echoes, answers, "The crown of the Tree of Life." 

There are two strange things about Kyungsoo's next target. The first, and most obvious, is that despite his nonchalant expression and relaxed hands-in-pocket posture, he is floating. The second, which takes Kyungsoo a minute to realize, is that he is glowing. At first Kyungsoo mistakes it for a trick of light, a combination of the stranger's bleached, almost white hair, and pale collared shirt, but there's no mistaking how the reflection off the pillar behind the stranger follows him as he descends down and forward, towards Jongin and Kyungsoo. Despite hovering a meter or so right over their heads, he is not looking at them. Instead, he seems to peer into the darkness around them, meditative.

"Or, should I say, the roots?" the stranger muses, before gesturing, like a dancer striking a pose, to both sides.

Around them, the atrium explodes with light. After the graveyard and the barely lit walkway, the intensity of a fully lit room is almost physical, and it's a full minute before Kyungsoo's eyes adjust. Jongin seems to process their surroundings first, and lets out a noise like he's been kicked in the head. Half-blind, Kyungsoo turns, expecting to fight off the stranger, but when he manages to focus his vision properly, he sees that the stranger is still hovering above them, harmless and distant, and Jongin is untouched by his side.

In fact, there are many Jongins, untouched, on all sides of them. The atrium turns out to be one large circular tank, like the centerpiece of an aquarium, only filled with the orange glow of LCL and hundreds of naked, floating bodies, all bearing Jongin's face. Their limbs, Kyungsoo realizes with dawning horror, are half-formed, or maybe half-rotting. He catches sight of webbed feet, another with a rubbery appendage that only hints at fingers and a hand. A few seem to be merely torsos and, as if mocking the other room, taper off into exposed spinal cords. But there is a body in the center pillar, floating at the stranger's height, that is complete: a perfectly identical Jongin, who seems to be merely sleeping. A little ring of air bubbles quivers by his head, disappearing, reforming. Kyungsoo wants to tell him that's not how LCL works, but his own mouth doesn't seem to be working. 

" _Hyung_ , I think I'm going to throw up," Jongin moans, nails digging into Kyungsoo's gun arm.

"Jongin," the stranger says, finally looking down at them. "Can I call you Kai? We've been waiting for you."

Now that he is no longer glowing in the dark, the stranger looks almost normal. He might be Jongin's age, and is dressed in a mockery of Jongin's school uniform, right down to a leather belt and shoes. Kyungsoo keeps the gun trained on his head, but the stranger only has eyes for Jongin, and rotates a little in the air, to get a better view of Jongin's face. "Who's we?" Kyungsoo demands, jerking the gun a little to try to draw attention away from Jongin.

"All of Kai's brothers, for one," the stranger says with a little laugh. When the sound echoes around them, it gives Kyungsoo the dizzying illusion that every clone is answering his question. In the tube, Jongin' clone twitches. Above them, the stranger flickers, then reappears by Jongin's side, too fast for Kyungsoo to follow. "And me, I suppose," he continues, placing his hands on both sides of Jongin's face. "I'm the first and last child of Adam. I guess your leader Kris calls me Luhan."

Kyungsoo starts to pull the trigger, but Luhan flickers again, now behind Kyungsoo, then once more, halfway to the ceiling and level with the Jongin in the tube. He strokes the surface of the pillar, where the clone's face shows through, with a tender hand, before turning back to Jongin.

"I've seen you before," Jongin says. "In my dream." He throws a helpless glance at Kyungsoo, who, frustrated, tries to nudge Jongin towards the door. "When I turned into one of the—"

"Jongin," Kyungsoo growls, "don't talk, try to get out of here, there has to be a switch—"

But it's too late. Slowly, as if summoned, Jongin begins to rise up from the ground. Like a man hypnotized, he keeps his eyes trained on Luhan and doesn't seem to hear Kyungsoo yelling for him to come back down. "Kai, I'm so glad to meet you," Luhan says. His face is half turned towards Kyungsoo, watching as Kyungsoo tries to pull Jongin back down with both hands, his fingers slipping, one by one, until they've pulled Jongin's slippers off of his airborne body. "Kris said I would like you," Luhan continues. He smiles, trying on the expression like a spare jacket, before tossing it aside. "After all, I was born to meet you."

Jongin is too far out of Kyungsoo's reach, and still rising. Desperate, Kyungsoo scrambles to pick up the gun he dropped. When he manages, finally, to wrap his trembling fingers around the gun, he aims for Luhan's face. For just a second Luhan looks like Jongin. Then, he looks like Yixing. Then, he is wearing Kyungsoo's face. That's when Kyungsoo fires. The bullet passes through Luhan's stomach and exits into the enormous test tube behind him, just inches shy of Jongin's clone. LCL gushes forth, tearing away at the edges of the broken glass like tissue. Somewhere, too, something erupts in Kyungsoo. When he looks down, he sees blood spreading down his lower torso. As he watches, it reaches his waist, his upper leg. Reaching for his knees. He can't feel anything, the LCL sticky and only a little thinner than blood as it clings to his feet. The bullet — he thinks, Luhan must have sent it back, Luhan must have — he fires his gun again, blindly — with the face of a true stranger, Kyungsoo — then Kyungsoo's father — Luhan fires — and Kyungsoo sinks into a sea of LCL. Pain, the press of air squeezing him on all sides, drowning out the sound of Jongin — or maybe EXO KAI — screaming his name.

As he sinks, he sees Jongin falling from great heights. Arms spread, both hands caked in blood, eyes closed, naked. Like an angel, descending to meet him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- thanks to the now defunct svenge for their complete collection of eva title cards, without which i would have never been able to make the only interesting part of this fic. the actual font used in eva for the hiragana/kanji is ryumin, which i did not want to purchase, which is why the second to last title card looks so out of place. i could have done a paste job but unfortunately the hiragana "o" of "omedetou" never appears in the original title card set, and instead of risking inconsistency, i just used another font entirely. the 'exogenlion' logo is a recreation using the font nhl washington. there is a glaring mistake in the 'g' but hopefully you wouldn't have noticed that if i didn't tell you.  
> \- obvious character parallels are obvious. vice commander kim is junmyeon, not jongdae.  
> \- it was suggested that i should make the suju angels go in age order and not haphazard-i-have-no-idea-who-the-members-of-suju-are order, but in an ideal world hankyung is actually the first "angel" adam and henry is tabris and exo is the 18th angel i.e. us kukukuku  
> \- realistically eva is a terrible series to try to graft exo onto, but if i tried to do this accurately and in-character i'd end up with mobile suit gundam xoxo.  
> \- the plot of eva hangs precariously on a lot of mother complexes that despite the obvious "MAMA" reference just wouldn't fly as well with exo, so instead i guess we have... clones?! and ~paternal sacrifices~. i originally planned for this to end with the dirac sea fight but it felt really incomplete, so at the last minute i shoved in luhaworu and i was too tired to work through the rest of the plot properly. and now i know how it feels to be hideki anno.


End file.
